The Earthy Saint | Lent 38

From Thomas Merton's great work New Seeds of Contemplation

Some men seem to think that a saint cannot possibly take a natural interest in anything created.  They imagine that any form of spontaneity or enjoyment is a sinful gratification of “fallen nature”.  That to be “supernatural” means obstructing all spontaneity with clichés and arbitrary references to God.  The purpose of these clichés is, so to speak, to hold everything at arms length, to frustrate spontaneous reactions, to exorcise feelings of guilt.  Or perhaps to cultivate such feelings!  One wonders sometimes if such morality is not after all a love of guilt!  They suppose that the life of a saint can never be anything but a perpetual duel with guilt, and that a saint cannot even drink a glass of cold water without making an act of contrition for slaking his thirst, as if that were a mortal sin.  As if for the saint every response to beauty, to goodness, to the pleasant, were an offense.  As if the saint could never allow himself to be pleased with anything but his prayers and his interior acts of piety.

A saint is capable of loving created things and enjoying the use of them and dealing with them in a perfectly simple, natural manner, making no formal references to God, drawing no attention to his own piety, and acting without any artificial rigidity at all.  His gentleness and his sweetness are not pressed through his pores by the crushing restraint of a spiritual strait-jacket.  They come from his direct docility to the light of truth and to the will of God.  Hence a saint is capable of talking about the world without any explicit reference to God, in such a way that his statement gives greater glory to God and arouses a greater love of God than the observations of someone less holy, who has to strain himself to make an arbitrary connection between creatures and God through the medium of hackneyed analogies and metaphors that are so feeble that they make you think there is something the matter with religion.

The saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good, while those who are not saints either think that created things are unholy, or else they don’t bother about the question one way or another because they are not interested in themselves.

The eyes of the saint make all beauty holy and the hands of the saint consecrate everything they touch to the glory of God, and the saint is never offended by anything and judges no man’s sin because he does not know sin.  He knows the mercy of God.  He knows that his own mission on earth is to bring that mercy to all men.